Please Make Her Go Away

Liz Cheney is blanketing the airwaves again today, and as is more often the case than not, she's the lone guest, unchallenged by someone with teeth from the reality-based community -- a privilege usually reserved for high officials or newsmakers. Obama hand-holding terrorists? Check. Saddam connected to Al Qaeda? Check.

It's an example of what E.J. Dionne was writing about in today's column:

A media environment that tilts to the right is obscuring what President Obama stands for and closing off political options that should be part of the public discussion. ...

The power of the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis [I would add the Cheneys] means that Obama is regularly cast as somewhere on the far left end of a truncated political spectrum. He's the guy who nominates a "racist" to the Supreme Court (though Gingrich retreated from the word yesterday), wants to weaken America's defenses against terrorism and is proposing a massive government takeover of the private economy. ...

Democrats are complicit in building up Gingrich and Limbaugh as the main spokesmen for the Republican Party, since Obama polls so much better than either of them. But the media play an independent role by regularly treating far-right views as mainstream positions and by largely ignoring critiques of Obama that come from elected officials on the left.